That Enduring Force

I avoided reading Beloved when it appeared in 1987. Toni Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and later she became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I still stayed away. For decades, I heard the book was difficult — the events in it so evil, so soul-destroying. So I closed my eyes. I believed that if I actually read Beloved, I would carry it inside me forever, unable to let it go. Now that I’ve finished the novel, I know that to be true, as Morrison intended it to be.

When, among a host of racist rants, Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, accused Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating white residents’ pets, three things came to mind that finally gave me the courage to face the book. First, Beloved is set in nineteenth-century Ohio, not far from Springfield, at the home of Sethe and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Denver. They live at 124 Bluestone Road, outside Cincinnati, a stop...